SLOPPY TRADECRAFT EXPOSES CIA DRUG PLANE
Seventeen months after an American-registered DC9 airliner was busted with 5.5 tons of cocaine, a major international scandal is brewing over a second drug trafficking incident in Mexico’s Yucatan involving an American-registered jet owned by a dummy front company of the kind usually associated with the CIA.
A weekend visit to “Donna Blue Aircraft Inc” of Coconut Beach FL., the company which FAA records show owned the Gulfstream II business jet (N987SA) which crash-landed with 3.7 tons of cocaine aboard in Mexico’s Yucatan two weeks ago, has revealed that the company’s listed address is an empty office suite with a blank sign out front.
There was no sign of Donna Blue Aircraft, Inc., at the address listed at the Florida Dept. of Corporations, 4811 Lyons Technology Parkway #8 in Coconut Beach FL.
However, there were, oddly enough, a half-dozen unmarked police cars parked directly in front of the empty suite.
Phone calls to Butters Development, the industrial park’s leasing agent, went unreturned.
Moreover the brief description of Donna Blue on its Internet page, apparently designed to “flesh out the ghost a little,” is such a clumsy half-hearted effort that it defeats the purpose of helping aid the construction of a plausible “legend,” or cover, and ends up doing more harm than good…
For example, the website features a quote from a satisfied Donna Blue Aircraft customer. Unfortunately his name is “John Doe.” And the listed phone number is right out of the movies: 415.555-5555.
Its known in the trade as “sloppy tradecraft.”
“Its My Party and I’ll Bust Who I Want To”
The biggest clue to date to the true identity of the individuals or organization operating behind the dummy front of “Donna Blue Aircraft” may lie in its initials, “DBA,” for “doing business as.”
It is the kind of cute nomenclature for which “the boys” are known to be fond.
For the Bush Administration, which recently launched a PR offensive announcing major gains in the multibillion-dollar anti-drug effort in preparation for asking Congress for a $1 billion Plan Colombia-type aid package to help Mexico fight drug traffickers, the controversy could not have come at a worse time.
The billion dollars in proposed U.S. aid, Mexican newspapers pointed out, will only be used to target drug traffickers with no obvious ties to American intelligence.
